The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  "Rahim," the Bear said, "what have you been telling them about me?"

  "Thatcha eat httle children but try to keep it to a minimum in the summer months."

  "Thanks," said the Bear. He addressed himself to his rhythm section: "If you come on up, I think Iris bought a case of beer for the weekend, and I could probably let you have a couple cheap."

  "Okay"

  "Okay"

  The Bear heard nothing very rhythmic in their assent. "Names?" asked the Bear. "I mean, won't you introduce us?"

  "This is Linton Bostic," Hatwell said, indicating the long tall rangy guy,

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  "on drums, and over here we have the great grey hope of the modern bass, Garrett Church."

  "I'm the Bear," said the Bear.

  "We figured," said Bostic, and opened that grin again, this time wider.

  "And this is the forest primeval," Hatwell explained, pointing at a tree.

  "Hm," Garrett Church said, and stuck his hands in his pants pockets.

  "That's his bassplayer riff," Hatwell told the Bear. "He's doing this arcane routine about how bassplayers recede into the background and don't talk."

  "How long he been doing it?" the Bear wanted to know.

  "Since w^e met him five six years back."

  "But we been working on him," said Bostic. "He's gonna crack."

  "Hm."

  "So," Hatwell cleared his throat for emphasis, "you gonna help us carry these instruments up those stairs or what?"

  "Wliy don't you come up and have a beer first," the Bear suggested. "Cool off after the drive."

  Hatwell looked both ways. "Instruments in the car," he said.

  "That's right," said the Bear. "We've got some bad raccoons and rabbits around here trying to get their hands on a Fender Rhodes."

  "All I brought's a DX-7. Those raccoons like wash 2i keyboard before they eat it?"

  "Actually," said Garrett, "I don't hke to leave my bass in a hot car. Oh, it's parked in the shade. It's probably okay. Anyone know the temperature today? It's probably all right. Maybe I'll get it. Lin, I'll have to take your trap case out. Well, maybe it's okay. Forget it. Nice place you've got here."

  No one paid attention to him.

  "Come the fuck upstairs before we die of old age," the Bear finally said.

  "Whakinda beer you got?" asked Bostic, showing a sense of enterprise and putting one foot on the bottom step.

  "A mixed case. I'm not sure," said the Bear. "Iris did the buying."

  "Iris?" asked Bostic. "Who's Iris?"

  "The woman hidden in this picture. C'mon upstairs and we'll try to find her."

  By the time everyone got upstairs, through the porch and into the cramped if comfy living room. Iris was there too, flushing red and white; the Bear wasn't sure these new guys would spot it, but to him her degree of fluster was obvious. "I think the lads would enjoy a beer," the Bear told her after introducing them, "after the heat and the dust of the road."

  "Actually the Sled's airconditioning works fine," said Hatwell, "and they

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  must've paved the Thruway since you saw it, but," he bowed almost imperceptibly, "beer would go down fine, if it's not too much trouble."

  "Not at all," said Iris, and began to withdraw kitchenward. The Bear was treated to the extended spectacle of his rhythm section's eyes bonging back and forth between himself and Iris, and the single question almost audible between them in the air: Is he banging her? I always knew, thought the Bear, that this was going to be a complicated weekend.

  He indicated the sofa and the armchairs. "At ease. Assume a seated position. Need to use the bathroom? We have two of them. Like anything to eat with those beers? We try to be the perfect hosts, here in the forest of Arden."

  The Bear had counted on two long sessions with the band on Saturday and Sunday and thought, well, maybe once everyone gets settled we can set up and do a little playing today, before the Friday couscous dinner special, but the guys were eager to get on with it: with significant ursine assistance Bostic hauled his drums up from the car, Harwell his DX-7 and what looked like a big guitar amp—"Thanks, but I don't think I'm gonna get enough volume out of your upright," he said, declining the house piano—and only when the other instruments were settled and the chairs and sofa moved aside did Garrett Church walk his nineteenth-century Dutch bass up the stairs and into a neutral corner of the living room.

  "Linton," said the Bear, "I think you'll have to keep the cymbal volume down for the room."

  Bostic only laughed.

  "It's a bright room," the Bear persisted.

  Bostic pulled a cymbal stand to full extension and spun a wingnut open. "The Fiend Who Walked the West," he said obscurely.

  Harwell got his keyboard hooked up and the amplifier humming sixty audible cycles a second, and demonstrated some of the DX-7's horrible synthesizer sounds before fine-tuning its most acceptable piano approximation. "I'm getting a good sampling keyboard 'fore we tour but this old thing's what I got for now. We're getting front money, right?"

  Garrett Church tuned his bass slowly, meditatively, drawing long pure tones out of it, bending them with large strong fingers, his left hand arched and articulate up the neck, tendons and ligaments and bones defined by the power of his grip. The Bear liked Garrett's sound and was pleased that he was not one of those bassists who lowered their action for speed and glissed their way into every note at the expense of depth and expression and control. He felt right away that Garrett Church would work out fine. And drums? Bostic was still setting up, hefting cymbals into place, checking the height of his

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  toms, brushing some invisible flaw from his ride cymbal with the heel of his hand. His cymbals were on the small side, and had a high bright shine. The Bear preferred darker timbres, but he'd see.

  Bobby Hatwell frowned at the ceiling, a window, the floor, shook a cigarette out of his pack and lit it.

  The Bear rattled his keys, tuned his horn to the keyboard and looked up. "'Straight No Chaser'?" he said.

  "A minute," said Bostic from his drumstool, finicked the tilt of his cymbals a final notch and turned a key on his snare-drum lugs until the sound was right.

  The Bear counted off and they began to play.

  The rh)lJim section was going to work out, he thought right away, during the head. They didn't have the weight of Ha Ha Ha, but they possessed a certain hip mobihty, and even though it would take a few choruses before all four of them began to find each other, you could see some things early.

  Like every good drummer the Bear had ever seen, Bostic played his own physique into a style: looselimbed and eccentric, with great independence of arms and legs. His cymbal beat danced Hghtly atop the time and he popped odd accents at improbable volume here and there—transmogrified Philly Joe Jones in that—and when he worked some polyrhythms up he'd start his phrasing on a tom-tom or some other peripheral outpost of the instrument, poff, then lay in a cross-comment on the snare, put his boot into time's behind on the bassdrum and only gradually, or in retrospect, did you realize that he was elaborating a line of thought that developed itself into complexities out of seeming random beginnings: hip stuff, thought the Bear, when he peeped it: now if I can only get him to work that level of invention a little deeper . . . well, give him time and he'll probably build.

  Garrett Church had a solid, loping way with time, and had found a way of keeping his walking line from turning into a reductive series of quarter notes: he tended to insert the ghost of a shuffle into the walk, hitting before the beat, then after it, not to weaken the onward impulse but to give it a stronger kick, better balance and more dimension. As they played, his note choices kept improving, chorus after chorus he stepped closer to what the Bear was playing on the horn, adding sympathy, nuance, irony, propulsion: the Bear got the impression of a keen ear and fine intelligence. When it was time for a bass solo, the Bear was relieved again to hear him retain command of tone: Ga
rrett could play fast without cheating the strings, and the resultant solidity of sound and intonation made all the difference to the strength of his solo. Another thing the Bear liked, something you didn't hear that often: now and then Garrett played like Mingus—not just the attack but the compositional

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  hornlike sense of line—and the Bear thought this a very good sign in one so young.

  Hatwell was Hatwell, God's own enfant terrible despite the unnatural soimds issuing from his DX-7. The Bear loved playing with him but he was going to ask him to use the house piano on ballads.

  The Bear himself wasn't playing at the top of his game but at the moment it wasn't important that he should. What he had to do just now was Hsten, and his ears were perked, his mind ticked avidly, and his inward eye screened selected shorts from the possible future. If there was a problem it would be with Bostic, who was plenty talented but might just lack the critical degree of, what to call it, focus? He was a damn good drummer, though, and he didn't try to drown you out. In any case, when they finished "Straight No Chaser"— the Bear coasted through a last solo before the head—the Bear said, "You guys are gonna work out fine. Thank you for bringing them here, Bob."

  Bostic laughed behind his drumset and tightened a tom-tom head. "You got to trust the Hat," he said, then did it louder: "YOU GOT TO TRUST THE HAT."

  "What's that unbelievable smell coming from the kitchen," the Hat wondered, lifting his sensitive nose into the air.

  "Chicken couscous," said the Bear.

  "GREAT," said Hatu^ell, but instead of gravitating to the kitchen door they all got into the music again, played a bunch of tunes one after the other, what would have been a set, including ballads. Skylark have you anything to say to me? You don't know what love is until you know the meaning of the blues. They played "Giant Steps" and "Confirmation" and "Stablemates" and "Impressions" and when they were finished they had pretty much forgotten how to talk.

  "We can eat dinner anytime you fike," said Iris, coming through the kitchen doorway with four more cold beers on a tray.

  "Hah?" the Bear and his band answered in nearly perfect unison. They had nearly forgotten what "eat" meant, who this woman was, and what she meant by "time."

  "Dinner is ready whenever you want," she helpfully explained.

  It took them awhile. They looked around the room, saw that the light outside the windows was fading from coral to magenta, and after awhile one of them nodded yes, probably it was Garrett, and soon the others joined in, and they agreed, yes, dinner'd be nice, and not long after that they realized that they were all incredibly hungry, in fact must have been hungry for hours already only, playing, hadn't noticed it.

  "Oh," the Bear told Iris finally. "Dinner. Rightr

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  Half an hour later, once they had splashed themselves with cold water and the food was actually out there on the table and the candles were lit and the wineglasses gleamed with peaked reflections of the candleflames, they ate Uke true musicians, that is to say like four creatures who had not seen food since early childhood and were determined to make up for lost time.

  "This is fabulous," said Bobby Hatwell, holding up a roughcut quadrant of something white and sauced on the end of his fork, "but what is it, some kind of potato?"

  "It's a turnip," said Iris from her end of the table. The Bear sat at the other end; the rhythm section was arrayed between them like a string of pearls.

  Hatuell stared at the piece of turnip on the end of his fork. "A turnip cannot possibly taste this good."

  "It's a very good turnip," Iris told him. "It's organic. It absorbed the other flavors as it cooked."

  "It's a wonderful turnip," Hatwell announced to the table, his voice booming unnaturally. "This is the greatest turnip in the history of the world." He stood up in place and raised the piece of turnip high. "This is one of the best nights of my life," he said, staring into infinite space, "and I didn't even get laid yet."

  "Doctor Jekdl and Captain Schmuck," Bostic explained.

  "Damnstraight," Hatwell said. "Fuckin' A."

  The Bear had already noted that while they were all drinking good red wine, Hatwell was keeping himself additionally liquid with the aid of a bottle of Cutty Sark, a rocks glass and a blue bowl of ice cubes. Had Iris bought the Scotch in town or had Hatwell brought it from the city? The Bear turned to Bostic and Garrett for a cue but they were looking down at their plates with uniform fixity. Iris was wearing her habitual expression of pleasant interest.

  Hatwell sat down heavily and ate his piece of the world's greatest turnip. The Bear noticed Garrett and Linton scanning Hatwell with what seemed practiced eyes. He also had the intuition that Hatwell was not entirely out of control: a whiff of theater: perhaps he himself was being examined: fitted out for a suit: assessed.

  Bostic piped up after awhile, the curves of his face so dark they reflected back only muffled bronze from the candleflames; his mouth opened easily into a smile above the finely formed assertive chin. "Yeah this is even better couscous than I had in France," he told Iris.

  "She thought of poaching a salmon," said the Bear, "but she doesn't trust me with salmon in company."

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  "You get down on the rocks with it," Hatwell said, "and growl at the rest of the diners. You attack the young. I saw you on PBS. You were bad."

  "I revert," the Bear nodded.

  "You're a wild animal." Hatwell poured himself more whiskey and added a single cube of ice to his glass. "You're a hunka hunka burnin' fur. You're— it'll come to me in a minute—a bear. Well, what the fuck, it's just another buffalo show. I should write Zippy. I should write John Carradine. I should write my name on the shithouse wall. I should kick Polly Bergen in the ass. I been cheated. This is not my right hfe. Nobody move."

  "And since I happen to love couscous to death," Linton persisted, leaning toward Iris, "and have eaten it in the best places, I know that this is great."

  "Thank you," Iris said.

  "You're welcome."

  "You've spent some time in France," Iris prompted.

  "Better part of a year." Bostic's arms danced briefly into the air to sketch that year's nature, then withdrew. "Went over with a version of the David Murray Octet, you know? Same thing happened there used to happen here, fans trooping in by the thousand, clapping and yelling every time we played two notes right and the guys in the band lookin' at each other and wondering what the fuck? cause the music wudn't nothing much and we all thought that as a soloist David was full of shit a lot of the time."

  "It was that bad?" the Bear asked him.

  "Nah. Zallright," said Bostic, and took a sip of wine. "Anyhow it was my first time in Europe and I decided I liked the life, so when the tour was over I didn't come back right away. Jammed around Paris with this guy, that guy, musicians who, okay, maybe wouldn't cut it here but could play. Got a little write-up from that guy in the Trih and found myself a fine French girl to live with and joined up with this blues band seemed to do most of its gigs for the French Communist Party—a night at the Yuri Gagarin Cultural Center, then the Stalingrad Memorial Blues Shack somewhere the fuck in Normandy. Y'see," he put down his glass the better to explain the point, "Communist mayor gets elected in some town changes all the names while he lasts so you got Rue Lenine, Brezhnev Boulevard . . . Cool with me. The Cocos were a trip, scholarly-looking cats always wanted to talk to you between sets about lay nwarz. Then I joined an African band awhile, went over to Germany, Switzerland, Italy, which I loved, the landscape, the renaissance towns, the walls, the towers, the olive trees—"

  "Tell him about your career as a terrorist," Hatwell growled, and poured himself another whiskey.

  This gave Bostic a moment's pause. "Yeah, okay, it's true." He dropped his

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  head in penitence, but raised it quickly enough. "I took some time off, hitched around Spain a Httle and got picked up one time by some nice-looking voung people i
n a big white van. We got to talking as we rolled along and it turned out they were Basque terrorists. Must've trusted me, pulled up the floorpanels and there was sticks of dynamite down there, clockworks, automatic weapons, gas masks, grenades, a whole bunch of what-the-fuck. They were cool people, told me they were nonviolent really, only, you know. We stopped in these little red clay towns in the hills and everyone'd come out of the woodwork and feed us bread and wine and olives and fantastic fucking sausages, and these amazing-looking chicks, dusky-looking Spanish chicks only they were Basque, right? would hang around and then want to sleep with us for the cause, or maybe just anyway, and I thought, Heyy, this could be the hfe."

  "Tell them," Hatwell said heavily, gripping his glass of Scotch.

  "Yeah," Bostic said. "I was into it. I was into it, I was ready to sign off on America and the rest of my life and join up awhile, all right? So my sign-off was I gave the Hat a call to tell him goodbye."

  "He got on the phone with me at five in the morning from Biarritz," HatM^ell said, "and told me about these incredible people he'd met, and the cause, and these beautiful Basque women and the little towns in the hills, you had to see them ..."

  "Oh, man," Bostic remembered.

  "And what did I tell you," Hatwell insisted.

  "He said," Bostic explained to the Bear, "he said, 'Linton, don't be a terrorist.'"

  "And what happened," Hatwell said.

  "He said, Linton don't be a terrorist, and I woke up. It was weird. I woke up in a phonebooth and wondered what was happening. I said my goodbyes and caught a train back to Paris. I probly owe Rahim Bobby Hatwell my life."

  "And one day," Hatwell said, "I'm gonna collect. I'm gonna ask you for it back."

  "How about I swear off drum solos for the tour."

  "Not enough. See," Hatwell explained to the Bear, "drummers get dangerous if they get too far from their comic books. They can't discriminate. They go where the rhythm is. End of story." He took a sip of whiskey. "Now, as it happens, Linton is a pretty goodnatured guy for someone whose basic instinct is to hit things with sticks and make it impossible for anyone else to hear shit. But you have to watch him, and once in awhile you have to tell him, Linton, behave; or Linton, don't be a terrorist."